Farmscape for December 11, 2020

The Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork says progress is being made in the effort to ensure Canada is prepared for a foreign animal disease incursion.
"African Swine Fever: How is Canada getting prepared?" will be the focus of a Swine Innovation Porc webinar set for January 6th.
Mark Fynn, the Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork, who will be discussing "Work on Emergency Euthanasia Preparedness" says a lot of work is being done to prepare for a foreign animal disease incursion and developments around the spread of African Swine Fever have intensified that effort.

Clip-Mark Fynn-Manitoba Pork:
Government at the federal level and the provincial level and industry have all been working together to get prepared for this and so there's a lot of people that are involved in the preparation in a lot of different areas including euthanasia.
I'm personally sitting on five different committees at the national, provincial, regional and more local levels as well and so there's quite a bit of work going into this from a number of different players.
Canada happens to be a country that does a lot of export of pork products and we also do some export of live pigs as well and unfortunately, in the event that a foreign animal disease occurs, we're very vulnerable to border closures to our products and to our pigs.
That's what really necessitates the need for euthanasia as well as the diseased pigs and those around the diseased farms for disease control purposes.
We're looking at a very large proportion of our industry that might be vulnerable to this.
We put a lot of effort into trying to arrange things with foreign governments in advance to avoid having to do unnecessary euthanasia but unfortunately quite a number of our pigs would be implicated if we did get a foreign animal disease.

Fynn says a lot of progress has been made in preparing for a foreign animal disease incursion but there is still a lot left to do.
He says a foreign animal disease can happen any time so the sooner the sector can be ready, the better.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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